| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

P. G. A. Orders. Britain, Australia, New Zealand and the Challenge of the United States, 1939–46: A Study of International History. (Studies in Military and Strategic History.) New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2003. Pp. vii, 262. $72.00.

Cold calculation, imperial sympathies, and distrust of the United States were among the reasons that Britain's Pacific dominions chose to pin their loyalties to the empire during and after World War II, according to P. G. A. Orders. In the prewar period, the southwest Pacific looked much like it had for many years, with European imperial powers holding sway, although Dutch, French, and Portuguese holdings were secondary to Britain's Australia and New Zealand. That world began to change with the Japanese conquests that opened the Pacific War. Older historiography argued that, with large-scale American military forces moving into the region, Pacific dominion policy makers embraced the United States as the natural replacement for a Britain that could no longer protect them. More recent historiography has revised that view to argue that a romantic imperial ideology blunted an appreciation by the Pacific dominions of Britain's decline as a Far Eastern power. Orders sides with the revisionists but works to fine tune the argument. Orders maintains that while policy makers from "down under" initially welcomed the security offered by American arms, they quickly began to distrust that same power. Their reluctance to embrace the United States was not only based on "dewy-eyed" nostalgia for empire but was also rooted in cold-hearted calculation of national interest. Knowing that in two world wars the United States waited for several years to get involved, Australian and New Zealand politicians wondered if the United States would be any more forthcoming in the future. They also understood that, for the foreseeable future, the great bulk of their exports and imports would depend on trade with the empire, not with the United States.

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